PARIS — For as long as Daniella Ramirez can remember, she’s been fully submerged in a pool and following in the footsteps of her aquatic family.
“I’m a third-generation artistic swimmer,” Ramirez said recently while preparing for the start of the eight-person team event at the Paris Olympics.
“My grandma did artistic swimming back when it was called ‘Water Ballet,’ and then my mom did artistic swimming as a member of the Venezuelan national team, and that’s how she met my dad, who was a diver for Venezuela.”
In other words, she did not stumble upon the mesmerizing and incredibly challenging sport accidentally.
“There was no random choice here,” she said.
But one thing that had eluded the entire family was an Olympic berth. It sat as a tantalizing prospect always just out of their reach and evocative of an achievement representing the pinnacle of aquatic sports.
That is, until this year — when Ramirez and her teammates notched a ticket to Paris at the World Championships in Doha, Qatar, with a sweeping performance that snapped a 16-year drought at the Games.
The jubilation came across in the most vivid facial expression one could imagine: Ramirez’s shock and joy reflecting not just her team’s state of mind but also the Ramirez family’s multigenerational pursuit for greatness at the games.
“For me, the pride is the family pride,” her mom, Carolina Mindiola, said as she gently wiped a tear from her cheek in an interview before competition began. “She represents everything that we’ve worked for our entire lives.”
Wednesday night on the sport world’s biggest stage, Ramirez and her teammates delivered again, capturing a silver medal with a stellar 914.34 total score — well above third-place Spain — in front of a roaring crowd at the Aquatics Centre in Saint-Denis, vaulting into the history books and giving the Ramirez family something they previously could only have dreamed about.
“Looking at what happened on Day 1 to be here and everything that’s happened in the past four years, it’s been a roller coaster,” Ramirez said. “But I’m so glad that we ended up here. And I’m just so grateful for this team. There’s nothing more magical than this team.”
Artistic swimming’s team event involves a combination of performances — technical, free and acrobatic over three nights — that collectively form a composite score.
The U.S. team came into the night with the second-highest overall total, behind eventual gold medal winner China, and performed a lights-out acrobatic routine to win silver. The medal is the first for Team USA in artistic swimming since Athens in 2004, when the Americans captured bronze in both duet and team.
“We’ve had so much inspiration from the past teams on our journey to this Games,” Ramirez said. “All the past Olympic teams from the sport have been reaching out and connecting with us and helping us throughout this whole process. So I think we’ve been thinking about [the idea] that’s going to be us next. It’s just so special.”
For Ramirez, 22, of Miramar, Florida, the years of swim practices, thousands of miles of separation for training and missed family events and celebrations suddenly are all prelude to the ultimate reward.
She left her home at age 15 to pursue training with the U.S. national team in the San Francisco Bay Area.
She said she was “couch surfing” for months while trying to find a setup — as the team tried to build the infrastructure for a new preparation model.
“The group that Daniella started with was pretty much a guinea pig-type of project that the USA synchronized swimming (the name formerly used for the sport) put together,” said Mindiola, her mother. “The rest of the world was doing it and getting ahead, and the U.S. was falling behind.”
After about a year, said Mindiola — an architect — she applied to roughly 50 jobs before she found one suitable to allow her to move across the country and join her daughter. But they were still separated from her husband, Fernando Ramirez, and Daniella’s two older siblings, a difficult burden to bear.
On the eve of winning a medal, Fernando Ramirez reflected on the sacrifice.
“She’s going to make it happen, not only for her, but for us as a family and as a great achievement for us as immigrants in this beautiful country that has given us the opportunity to be who we are,” he said.
He guided and nurtured his daughter’s passion for swimming from an early age and moved his family from Venezuela in the 1990s so they could have the chance to pursue the American dream. He spoke slowly, fighting back tears.
“For her to get that flag and represent the United States … bring back the United States to where it belongs [in the sport] and win a medal — I couldn’t be more thankful and proud.”